On Wednesday I turned in two more chapters of the horrid treatise, and the weight slid so quickly from my soul that my soul lost its calibration, floated up to the ceiling, was buffeted by the heating vents and I had to bail on a pizza party and run home through the dark winter. Now I get my first real Saturday in months, coffee and slippers while the floodwaters rise outside; ants crop up at gaps in the baseboards and go running across the laptop keyboard, the way ID-checking police have cropped back up in my university building. I couldn’t go to work yesterday. In the meantime other elements are taking torches to the chancellor’s house; well, we don’t want that. They arrested two students and six unstudents. The movement slops over.

What else? I learned how to write a Perl search engine, a couple of Objective-C methods that didn’t crash; data structures anchor your right to live in California. Twelve or thirteen new songs have pulled together in the arena of the mind and are trying on different outfits. The two canned novel-germs in the basement will need to be aerated in time, or the botulism will have us all; but patience, I’m not even a doctor yet.

damn it, paul, you're an artist, not a doctor!

congrats on the treatise :) sorry about the ants, ugh, if you find their entry point you may be able to stem that tide, but i guess the interstices will always crawl

This morning there was a huge influx and I screamed, “this is the last straw, we have to leave Berkeley”  but then I kept on and exercised aretē with the caulk gun

If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least another cigarette. I don’t care about it. I don’t even care about women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You can’t get me one.

You might fool yourself but you can't fool me. You ALWAYS cared about women!

Alex Danchev. Cezanne: A Life. Pantheon, 2012.
It's often loose and can feel like a collection of anecdotes, but then there's something appropriate about letting incidents hang free as disconnected brushstrokes rather than plaster it all with narrative contour.

Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.